Similarity-aware Web content management and document pre-fetching

Web caching is intended to reduce network traffic, server load and user-perceived retrieval latency. Web pre-fetching, which can be considered as "active" caching, builds on regular Web caching, minimizing further a Web user's access delay. To be effective, however, the pre-fetching techniques must be able to predict subsequent Web access with minimum computational overheads. This paper presents a similarity-based mechanism to support similarity-aware Web document pre-fetching between proxy caches and browsing clients. We first define a set of measures to assess similarities between Web documents, and then propose a multi-cache architecture to cache Web documents based on those similarities. A predictor is developed to support the similarity-aware document pre-fetching algorithm. Preliminary experiments have shown that our predictor offers superior performance when compared with some existing prediction algorithms.